Comprehension of Linguistic Dependencies: Speed‐Accuracy Tradeoff Evidence for Direct‐Access Retrieval From Memory

Comprehenders can rapidly and efficiently interpret expressions with various types of non‐adjacent dependencies. In the sentence The boy that the teacher warned fell , boy is readily interpreted as the subject of the verb fall despite the fact that a relative clause, that the teacher warned , intervenes between the two dependent elements. We review research investigating three memory operations proposed for resolving this and other types of non‐adjacent dependencies: serial search retrieval , in which the dependent constituent is recovered by a search process through representations in memory, direct‐access retrieval in which the dependent constituent is recovered directly by retrieval cue operations without search, and active maintenance of the dependent constituent in focal attention. Studies using speed‐accuracy tradeoff methodology to examine the full timecourse of interpreting a wide range of non‐adjacent dependencies indicate that comprehenders retrieve dependent constituents with a direct‐access operation, consistent with the claim that representations formed during comprehension are accessed with a cue‐driven, content‐addressable retrieval process. The observed timecourse profiles are inconsistent with a broad class of models based on several search operations for retrieval. The profiles are also inconsistent with active maintenance of a constituent while concurrently processing subsequent material, and suggest that, with few exceptions, direct‐access retrieval is required to process non‐adjacent dependencies.